Perform at your best

The small business guide to elevating your performance

Picture this scenario: you end your day thinking about how you’d like to focus on tomorrow. You may have a project that you’d like to start. Or you may have a financial target you know you could achieve if you could just move a business case from concept to execution.

But then tomorrow comes and you wake up to an email telling you that your top supplier is leaving you to work with a competitor. To make it worse, you have a vendor who says you have outstanding bills. You check and the reason why the customer’s project is delayed is because the same vendor hasn’t shipped the products you ordered. A colleague tells you that your working capital ratio is moving below 1%. Oh, and the bank says you’ll be delayed in closing on your business loan because of an issue with underwriting.

Day in, day out, well-made plans dissolve because of pitfalls that you can’t help but think you could have avoided. The very essence of professional frustration is being unable to do your job. But don’t worry. You aren’t alone.

In association with Sage, IDG asked executives at 300 companies worldwide what their objectives were in the coming year.* The first priority was driving revenue growth, closely followed by improving operational agility and flexibility.